Pharma giant AstraZeneca will list on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, days after it announced big commitments on the other side of the world.
Like the rest of Big Pharma, the company has a balancing act. It wants a close relationship with the U.S., its biggest market, and the listing is intended to boost investment there.
Meanwhile, innovation-friendly China is attracting pharma companies that urgently need to develop new medicines to replace the blockbuster drugs whose patents will expire within the next few years. Pricing challenges in the U.S. adds to the pressure.
AstraZeneca has announced it’s investing billions in China and partnering with a Chinese biotech on weight-loss drugs, just before its shares list in the U.S on Monday.
The developments come at a critical time for the pharma industry as companies are increasingly looking east for innovation to replace the revenue of current blockbuster medicines going off patent in the next couple of years. Pricing challenges in the U.S. market, which accounts for the bulk of profits for most big pharma companies, are adding to the pressure on Big Pharma.
China’s President Xi Jinping (R) and Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer shake hands before their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on January 29, 2026.
Carl Court | Afp | Getty Images
On Thursday, AstraZeneca said it plans to invest $15 billion in China through 2030 to expand both manufacturing and research and development, as Keir Starmer became the first UK prime minister to visit the country for eight years.
“These investments span the value chain, from drug discovery and clinical development to manufacturing, and bring Chinese innovation to the world,” the company said, while highlighting a flurry of other partnerships with other biotechs in the region.
In a separate announcement on Friday, the UK’s largest company would partner up with Hong Kong-listed CSPC Pharmaceuticals to strengthen its obesity portfolio followed. The collaboration agreement includes eight of CSPC’s preclinical and early stage programs, including a once-monthly injectable. CSP stock fell 10.2% on the announcement.
AstraZeneca will pay CSPC $1.2 billion upfront, and an additional $17.3 billion if certain regulatory, research and sales milestones are met, an AstraZeneca spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Friday. The company declined to comment further on its geographic priorities.
The announcements came just before the listing of AstraZeneca shares on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, as well as its recently announced $50 billion U.S. investment to waive off U.S. pharma tariffs.
“What we can discern from this is that the US and China will be the two most important regions for the company for the foreseeable future,” Camilla Oxhamre, portfolio manager at Rhenman & Partners, told CNBC via email.
AstraZeneca’s balancing act
The U.S. is AstraZeneca’s by far largest market, and the company said last year it would end its American depositary shares program to pursue the direct New York Stock Exchange listing, keeping its listings also in London and Stockholm, saying it wanted a more global investor base.
“It’s the largest pharma company [in China] and when they decide to list in the U.S., there would always be a question about the commitment in the minds of some to China, and the fact that they had a few investigations last year,” HSBC’s Rajesh Kumar, head of European life sciences and healthcare equity research, told CNBC. In 2025, Astrazeneca faced several probes by Chinese regulators into unpaid import duties.
“So they are, in effect, telling you very clearly that they are committed to China by this action,” Kumar added.
China is also AstraZeneca’s second-largest market. Oxhamre, whose fund has a large long position in Astra, added that the Chinese market would “continue to grow in importance over time, both in terms of revenue and research.”
And Astra isn’t the only pharma company looking to China for new, innovative assets. London-listed GSK inked a deal with Hengrui Pharma worth up to $12 billion in July, most of it tied to achieving certain development and commercial milestones.
China’s hot biotech scene
Licensing deals between Big Pharma and Chinese biotechs, like the one between AstraZeneca and CSPC, have increased sharply in recent years, with 57 such deals in 2025, according to Biopharma Dive data.
“These deals demonstrate the success of China’s long-running effort to move up the biopharma value chain, from fast followers to differentiated assets that can compete globally,” said PitchBook analysts in a report published last month.
China’s emergence as a leader in preclinical and early-stage development comes as biotech funding elsewhere has suffered in recent years, and is helped by the speed at which early human trials can be conducted there. A reverse brain drain where Chinese scientists are returning to the country is also helping the country’s biotech sector, according to Kumar.
“China’s biopharma sector has reshaped itself around next-generation therapeutics paired with efficient clinical-trial infrastructure to de-risk these assets,” the PitchBook analysts said.
“Multinational and mid-cap biopharma companies are sourcing assets from China at growing rates, spanning both headline megadeals and smaller licensing deals. Importantly, this activity is skewing toward complex biologics rather than legacy modalities.”
A Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs report from June suggested “China has the most immediate opportunity to overtake the United States in biotechnology” and that this could “quickly shift the global balance of power.”
But late 2025 saw a meaningful pickup in U.S. biotech funding.
“There will always be innovation coming from both geographies,” Kumar said. “The world has changed… China was catching up with the U.S., [the] U.S. will re-accelerate.”
– CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report
